little darling

 

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I believe the first living cell

Had echoes of the future in it, and felt

Direction and the great animals, the deep green forest

And whale’s-track sea; I believe this globed earth

Not all by chance and fortune brings forth her broods,

But feels and chooses. And the Galaxy, the firewheel

On which we are pinned, the whirlwind of stars in which our sun is one dust-grain, one electron, this giant atom of the universe

Is not blind force, but fulfils its life and intends its courses. 

“All things are full of God. 

Winter and summer, day and night

war and peace are God."

—Robinson Jeffers

De Rerum Virtute, II, excerpt

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My heart is moved by all I cannot save:

so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.


—Adrienne Rich
Dream of a Common Language

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once there was, and once there wasn’t

 

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'once upon a time' in other languages: 

 

korean: “back when tigers used to smoke” (호랑이 담배 피우던 시절에) [x]

czech: “beyond seven mountain ranges, beyond seven rivers” (za sedmero horami a sedmero řekami)

georgian: “there was, and there was not, there was…” (იყო და არა იყო რა, იყო…)

hausa: “a story, a story. let it go, let it come.” [x]

romanian: “there once was, (as never before)… because if there wasn’t, it wouldn’t have been told” (A fost odată, ca niciodată că dacă n-ar fi fost, nu s-ar mai povesti…)

lithuanian: “beyond nine seas, beyond nine lagoons: (už devynių jūrų, už devynių marių)

catalan: “see it here that in that time in which beasts spoke and people were silent…” (vet aquí que en aquell temps que les bèsties parlaven i les persones callaven…) [x]

turkish: “Once there was, and once there wasn’t. In the long-distant days of yore, when haystacks winnowed sieves, when genies played jereed in the old bathhouse, [when] fleas were barbers, [when] camels were town criers, [and when] I softly rocked my baby grandmother to sleep in her creaking cradle, there was/lived, in an exotic land, far, far away, a/an…* (Bir varmış, bir yokmuş. Evvel zaman içinde, kalbur saman içinde, cinler cirit oynar iken eski hamam içinde, pireler berber [iken], develer tellal [iken], ben ninemin beşiğini tıngır mıngır sallar iken, uzak diyarların birinde…)

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It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools—that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone. 

The joke part is that we forget it. Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it’s Pythagoras. We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh. 

―Annie Dillard
Holy the Firm

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The language of birds is very ancient, and like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical; little is said, but much is meant and understood. 


—Gilbert White
Letter XLIII, Selborne, 

9 September 1778

 

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(all) creatures have territories ...

for some birds, their song is a fence.

—Wendell Berry 

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say i am

  

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There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. 

They make themselves manifest. 

They are what is mystical.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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Out of this same light, out of the central mind, 

We make a dwelling in the evening air, 

In which being there together is enough.

—Wallace Stevens

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questions

 

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All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.

My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.

The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?
Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.

If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version

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Tear off the mask. Your face is glorious. —Rumi

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It is easy to know the beauty of inhuman things, sea, storm and mountain; it is their soul and their meaning. Humanity has its lesser beauty, impure and painful; we have to harden our hearts to bear it.


—Robinson Jeffers
The World’s Wonders

 

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You say ‘I’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this — although you will not believe in it — is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’.


—Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra

 

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The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.


—Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil

 

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People think that the world itself is overflowing with beauty,

but they forget that they are its cause.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of the Idols

💗

no(thing

  

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There is nothing to do. Just be. 
Do nothing. Be. 

No climbing mountains and sitting in caves. 
I do not even say: ‘be yourself’, since you do not know yourself. 

Just be. 

Having seen that you are neither the ‘outer’ world of perceivables,
nor the ‘inner’ world of thinkables, that you are neither body nor mind, 
just be.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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soften now

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Brick and mortar
And solid as the ground
But you're carrying too much
And slowly breaking down
Cannon fodder
And looking to escape
The heaviness of all your mistakes

Weighing down, don't let it weigh you down
You've been so hard on yourself
It's time to let things soften now
Weighing down, don't let it weigh you down
You've been so hard on yourself
It's time to let things soften now

You wish you weren't, but you're falling down again
It's been a hard road full of lessons
Feeling hungry and trapped in solitude
The way that we choose to look at things is an attitude
Looking at the skyline tonight I choose gratitude

Weighing down, don't let it wеigh you down
You've been so hard on yourself
It's time to lеt things soften now
Weighing down, don't let it weigh you down
You've been so hard on yourself
It's time to let things soften now

You've been so hard on yourself
It's time to let things soften now
I waited for you like you waited for me too
We didn't get it right, but wanted to

Weighing down, don't let it weigh you down
You've been so hard on yourself
It's time to let things soften now
Weighing down, don't let it weigh you down
You've been so hard on yourself
It's time to let things soften now

You've been so hard on yourself
That it's time to let things soften now


—Julian Taylor
Weighing Down

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Save all your energies for breaking the wall your mind has built around you. —Nisargadatta

 

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Some years ago, I was walking downtown San Francisco with a great friend and a learned Tibetan scholar. I asked him about one of the most striking ways that the Tibetans express the uniqueness of the human condition.

Imagine, they say, that deep in the vast ocean there swims a great and ancient turtle who surfaces for air once every hundred years. Imagine further that floating somewhere in the ocean is a single ox-yoke carried here and there by random waves and currents. What are the chances that when the turtle surfaces, his head will happen to emerge precisely through the center of the ox-yoke? That is how rare it is to be born as a human being!

In the middle of our conversation, I pointed to the crowds of men and women rushing by on the street and I gestured in a way to indicate not only them, but all the thousands and millions of people rushing around in the world. "Tell me, Lobsang," I said, "if it is so rare to be born a human being, how come there are so many people in the world?"

My friend slowed his pace and then stopped. He waited for a moment, taking in my question. I remember suddenly being able to hear, as though for the first time, the loud and frenetic traffic all around us. He looked at me and very quietly replied, "How many human beings do you see?”

—Jacob Needleman

Time and the Soul

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each by 0ne

 

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Stone by stone and step by step

And heart by heart and head by head

The beautiful days do pass

Thread by thread and leaf by leaf

And one by one and each by each

The days are beautiful and do not pass

Grain by grain and body by body

Side by side and hand by hand

Good will win the battle

Stone by grain and each by one

And hand by heart and head by heart

Love is as vast as the world.

—Robert Desnos

Todd Sanders version

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life in two days

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I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred.

I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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largerloves

minoracts

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tricky

 

sea water

 

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When we first started looking through microscopes
a cold fear blew and it's still blowing.
Life hitherto had been frantic enough
in all its shapes and dimensions.
Which is why it created small-scale creatures,
assorted tiny worms and flies,
but at least the naked human eye
could see them.

But then suddenly beneath the glass,
foreign to a fault
and so petite,
that what they occupy in space
can only charitably be called a spot.
The glass doesn't even touch them,
they double and triple unobstructed,
with room to spare, willy-nilly.

To say they're many isn't saying much.
The stronger the microscope
the more exactly, avidly they're multiplied.
They don't even have decent innards.
They don't know gender, childhood, age.
They may not even know they are - or aren't.
Still they decide our life and death.
Some freeze in momentary stasis,
although we don't know what their moment is.

Since they're so minuscule themselves,
their duration may be
pulverized accordingly.
A windborne speck of dust is a meteor
from deepest space,
a fingerprint is a farflung labyrinth
where they may gather
for their mute parades,
their blind iliads and upanishads.
I've wanted to write about them for a long while,
but it's a tricky subject,
always put off for later
and perhaps worthy of a better poet,
even more stunned by the world than I.
But time is short. I write.


—Wisława Szymborska
microcosmos
Stanisław Barańczak, Clare Cavanagh version

 

 

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To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. 

These things were before ever man stood on the shore of the ocean and looked out upon it with wonder; they continue year in, year out, through the centuries and the ages, while man’s kingdoms rise and fall.

—Rachel Carson

Under the Sea Wind

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It’s nice
after dinner
to walk down
to the beach
and find
the biggest thing
on earth
relatively calm.

—A.R. Ammons

Reading

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allchannels

wait - what ?

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beauti(ful

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You suppose that you are the lock on the door
But you are the key that opens it

It’s too bad that you want to be someone else

You don’t see your own face, your own beauty
Yet, no face is more beautiful than yours.


—Rumi

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questions

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Where there is a duality, there one sees another; there one sees, hears, touches or speaks to another 

But where everything has become just one's own self, then whereby and whom would one see, hear, touch, think of or speak to? 

Then whereby and whom would one understand?


—Brihadaranyaka Upabishad (2.4.14)

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The beginning of the spiritual journey is the realization - not just the information, but the real interior conviction - that there is a higher power, or God. I would make it as easy as possible for everyone, that there is an Other - capital “O”. 

Second step, is to try and become the Other - capital “O”.

And finally, the realization that there is no other.

—Father Thomas Keating

 

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We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. 

We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. 

This is true for the entire universe.

―The Upanishads

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unit(y

   

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When we say, ‘God is love’, we are saying something very great and true. But it would be senseless to grasp this saying in a simple-minded way as a simple definition, without analyzing what love is. For love is a distinguishing of two, who nevertheless are absolutely not distinguished for each other. 

The consciousness or feeling of the identity of the two—to be outside of myself and in the other—this is love.  

I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other— and I am only because I have peace with myself; if I did not have it, then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. 

This other, because it likewise exists outside itself, has its self-consciousness only in me, and both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves and of our identity; we are only this intuition, feeling and knowledge of our unity.


[…]


For sense experience, two things cannot be in one and the same place; they exclude each other. But in the idea, distinctions are not posited as exclusive of each other; rather they are found only in this mutual inclusion of the one with the other. This is the truly supersensible [realm]…


—Hegel 
The Philosophy of Religion

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every trust survives

 

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I said it to you for the clouds
I said it to you for the tree of the sea
For each wave for the birds in the leaves
For the pebbles of sound
For familiar hands
For the eye that becomes landscape or face
And sleep returns it the heaven of its colour
For all that night drank
For the network of roads
For the open window for a bare forehead
I said it to you for your thoughts for your words
Every caress every trust survives.


—Paul Eluard

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I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

 

.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading - treading - till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum -

Kept beating - beating - till I thought

My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box

And creak across my Soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race,

Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down -

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing - then -

—Emily Dickinson

 

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you know

   

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We are not stuff that abides,

but patterns that perpetuate themselves. 

—Norbert Weiner

.

 

You are like a dewdrop, on a multidimensional spider's web in the morning. And if you look at that thing carefully, you will see in every dewdrop the reflections of all the other dewdrops. So the way that dewdrop looks goes with the way all the other ones look, you see.

—Alan Watts

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You are all things, and all things are your soul. —Conrad Aiken

   

.

 

Out of my deeper heart a bird rose and flew skyward.
Higher and higher did it rise, yet larger and larger did it grow.

At first it was but like a swallow, then a lark, then an eagle, then as vast as a spring cloud, and then it filled the starry heavens.
Out of my heart a bird flew skyward. And it waxed larger as it flew.
Yet it left not my heart.


—Kahlil Gibran

.

 

I am not this hair,

I am not this skin,

I am the soul that lives within.


—Rumi

.

I have inside me the winds, the deserts, the oceans, the stars, and everything created in the universe. 

We were all made by the same hand, and we have the same soul.


—Paulo Coelho
The Alchemist

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everything is really everyone

 

.

Conventional terms such as ‘the environment,’ and even ‘nature’ itself (particularly when opposed to ‘culture’), compound the erroneous idea that there is a neat divide in the world between us and them, between humans and non-humans, between our lives and the teeming, multitudinous living and being of the planet. 

All human life and being is inextricably entangled with and suffused by everything else. 

This broad commonwealth includes every inhabitant of the biosphere: the animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses. It includes the rivers, seas, winds, stones and clouds that support, shake and shadow us. These animate forces, these companions on the great adventure of time and becoming, have much to teach us. We are who we are because of them, and we cannot live without them.

Lynn Margulis, the most significant evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century, had this to say about our entanglement with non-human life: 'No matter how much our own species preoccupies us, life is a far wider system. Life is an incredibly complex interdependence of matter and energy among millions of species beyond (and within) our own skin. These Earth aliens are our relatives, our ancestors, and part of us. They cycle our matter and bring us water and food. Without "the other” we do not survive.’

The world is made up of subjects, not objects. Everything is really everyone, and all those beings have their own agency, points of view and forms of life.  

‘Life and Reality’ wrote the Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts, ‘are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.’

—James Bridle
Ways of Being
excerpts

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